Microsoft may have been living its dream... A dream of developing a web browser that could cross challenges and obstacles like privacy, safety and speed in a jiffy. We all know that the Windows-maker has been working on a Chromium-based web browser, just like Google Chrome. Microsoft has now introduced a new Edge browser that is said to borrow features from Chrome and Microsoft Edge to deliver the best of both platforms. It has also unveiled Bing -- a search engine for businesses. The Edge browser now has a new logo, which means that the old blue-coloured ‘e’ is gone for good.
The company is optimistic to make the browser available to the general public at around January 15 in more than 90 languages. If you want to take an experience of the new browser now, you can easily download the release candidate of the Microsoft Edge for Windows and macOS. For those who don’t know, a release candidate is a version of a software that is functional but not quite ready to be released to the masses for daily use.
‘In our mission to empower people with knowledge with Microsoft 365, one critical opportunity is the internet. We know that 60 per cent of the time people spend on the PC is within the web browser. At Microsoft, we believe it is time to expect more from your web experience whether you are using it for personal or business use, an IT manager in a company, or a web developer. Today we introduce the new Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Bing – the browser and search engine for business,’ Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President, Modern Life & Devices, Microsoft, said in a statement.
Mehdi says that the new browser and the search engine will ‘unite the internet with your intranet with Microsoft Search in Bing so that you can increasingly access more of your important data in a single browse and search experience.’ It will provide default privacy protection, while still allowing its users to benefit from web personalisation. The most important feature of the new duo is that it will enable users to research directly into Microsoft Office applications. This essentially means that these new experiences will save its users’ time in searching for information on the web and inside their company’s data.
The company also introduced a new Office app for Android and iOS that combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app for mobile productivity. The app is available in public preview for Android and iOS (via Apple's TestFlight beta testing programme). 'With the new Actions pane, you can intuitively complete a variety of common on-the-go tasks, such as creating and signing PDFs and sharing files between devices,' said Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365.
